EPISODE 58: Self-Driving Cars, Cybersecurity & Trust

What happens when the welfare state designs its technology to side-eye first and ask questions later? In this episode, we take a ride into the world of self-driving cars and ask: What happens to trust when your car gets hacked?Drawing upon a 2025 autonomous car-hacking experiment, we explore how trust is built, broken, and crucially, whether that trust can be repaired once a system puts you in harms way.This isn’t just about cars. It’s about what happens when we hand over control to a system we don’t fully understand.Expect human factors, socio-technical theory, real-world cyber scenarios, and the uncomfortable reality that fixing the system isn’t the same as fixing trust.In This Episode, We Discuss:The Attack Surface is Trust: Why the real vulnerability in autonomous systems isn’t the code, it’s human belief.Hack vs Bug: Why a malicious attack hits differently than a system error (and why that distinction matters).Transparency After a Breach: Does telling people the truth about a cyber attack actually rebuild trust or just make them more nervous?The Social Truth about Trust: Why you’re not just trusting the car, but the company, the regulators and the entire system behind it.LINKSThe Impact of Cybersecurity Attacks on Human Trust in Autonomous Vehicle Operations by Cherin Lim, David Predez, Linda Ng Boyle and Prashanth Rajivan (2025)Foundations for an Empirically Determined Scale of Trust in Automated Systems by Jiun-Yin Jian, Ann Bisantz, Colin Drury, and James Llinas (1998)Test your morals with the Moral Machine game.